November 15, 2012

The Sociology of Busyness

If you are a student, and even if you are not, chances are
this time of year means you are very busy. Whether it’s the upcoming holidays,
exams, term papers, or other obligations, for some reason the end of the year can mean
a lot of busyness.

I recently had a student come to my office hours to talk
about his progress, and the student admitted that he was overcommitted to many
campus activities and that it had affected his coursework. I’m sure he is not
alone; students regularly struggle with their workload and find that it is
virtually impossible to devote the amount of time to each of their classes as
they would like to.

I can relate, as I have been busy grading and juggling my
own deadlines and workload. What can sociology add to our understanding of
busyness?

While being busy might just be something we take for granted
or might seem not worth studying, in fact many sociologists study how people
make use of their time. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) even collects data on how Americans spend their days in
the American Time Use
Survey (ATUS). ATUS is
meant to find out how much time people spend working, caring for family
members, volunteering, or other leisure activities. The BLS uses the data
collected to get a better snapshot of worker productivity, and to understand
the kinds of unpaid work that people engage in regularly.

As you can see from the chart
above, college students report engaging in multiple activities over the course
of a day. This represents the national average, so your activities might vary
from the chart above. (You might want to think about your schedule compares:
are there other responsibilities or activities this chart leaves out?)

ATUS can also help us identify important trends. The most
recent ATUS survey
results indicate that nearly forty million Americans provided unpaid
eldercare in 2011, yielding important policy information about the aging
population and their caregivers. This information gives us useful data on the
time crunches people might encounter due to family obligations, particularly
for women between 45 and 64, who are the most likely caregivers to elderly
relatives. We can look at long term trends to make policy decisions about
eldercare for our aging population, and better understand the time crunches
that people—who often work in the labor force as well—face on a daily basis.

ATUS data also tell us that
women do more of the caregiving (56 percent of all eldercare providers) and are
also more likely do household work on a daily basis than men (83 percent versus
65 percent). This finding is consistent with data collected by sociologists in
their own smaller studies.

For instance, in her book, The
Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home, sociologist Arlie Hochschild studied families
up close using ethnography to understand how families divided household labor
and attempted to balance these responsibilities with jobs in the labor force. She describes how women tended to do more
work at home than men, ironically even more so within couples that espoused
more egalitarian ideas about gender.
Sociologist Annette Lareau also studied families in their homes and
found that for more affluent families, much of their time was spent shuttling
children around from activity to activity, as she describes in Unequal Childhoods: Class,
Race, and Family Life.

Hochschild’s more recent
book, The Time
Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work involved interviews
with employees at every level of a Fortune 500 company to discuss how they
attempted to balance the demands of home and work. For some employees with
stressful homelives and family conflicts, work ironically became more of a
refuge than home.

While busyness might seem
like just an inevitable fact of life, we can learn a lot about gender, race,
and class in studying how people spend their time. Although we might think that
work life and family life are entirely separate, the reality is these “separate
spheres” often overlap and we have to work to negotiate between them.

Think about what’s keeping
you and those around you busy: how might sociology help you understand the
patterns that shape our everyday lives?